“Wouldn’t I?” she said. “That does make me smile.”
“I thought so,” he answered good-humoredly—“and Maud, you’d like it, of course?”
Maud did not like the thought of going at all. In this little party of four, two were moved in their actions by secret predilections of which the others were ignorant. Maud thought of leaving her love affair at the critical point it had reached, and, with anguish at her heart, looked heavily indifferent.
“I don’t know,” she said, crumbling her bread, “I don’t think it’s such fun in Europe. You just travel round in little stuffy trains, and have to live in hotels without baths.”
“Well, you and I, Pussy,” said Shackleton, “seem to be the only two who’ve got any enthusiasm. You’ll have to try and put some into Maud, and if the worst comes to the worst we can kidnap the old lady.”
He was in an unusually good temper, and the dinner was animated and merry. Only Maud, after the European suggestion, grew more stolidly quiet than ever. But she cheered herself by the thought that the spring was six months off yet, and who could tell what might happen in six months?
After dinner the ladies repaired to the music room, and Shackleton, following a custom of his, passed through one of the long windows into the garden, there to pace up and down while he smoked his cigar.
The night was warm and odorous with the scent of hidden blossoms. Now and then his foot crunched the gravel of a path, as his walk took him back and forth over the long stretch of lawn broken by flower-beds and narrow walks. The great bulk of the house, its black mass illumined by congeries of lit windows, showed an inky, irregular outline against the star-strewn sky.
Presently the sound of a piano floated out from the music room. The man stopped his pacing, listened for an instant, and then passed round to the side of the house. The French windows of the music room were opened, throwing elongated squares of light over the balcony and the grass beyond. He paused in the darkness and looked through one of them. There, like a painting framed by the window casing, was Pussy Thurston seated at the piano singing, while Maud sat near by listening. One of Miss Thurston’s most admired social graces was the gift of song. She had a small agreeable voice, and had been well taught; but the light, frail tones sounded thin in the wide silence of the night. It was the feebly pretty performance of the “accomplished young lady.”
Shackleton listened with a slight smile that increased as the song drew to a close. As it ceased he moved away, the red light of his cigar coming and going in the darkness.